Can’t Lose Weight? Get Healthy First Try Cross-Training Your Diet
15 Dec 2025 · 15 min
JJ Virgin explains how varying calories and macronutrients, like cross-training in exercise, breaks weight-loss plateaus and prevents metabolic adaptation. She recommends a three-week elimination diet to find food intolerances, a sneaky sugar inventory, and cycling between 12-hour fasts and occasional 16-hour or one-meal-a-day protocols.
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Hey, this is JJ Virgin. Thanks so much for joining me. This is Ask the Health Expert. In each episode, I put the power of health in your hands and share ways to get healthy, lose weight, heal your gut, detox, and lots more so you can look and feel better fast. If you'd rather watch the video, hey, I did put on my makeup and do my hair, so check it out on my YouTube channel. Hey, J.J. virgin here. Okay, Real talk. So often the holidays sneak up on me, travel, gifts, hosting, you know, all the things and suddenly it's like, wait, who spent what and where? And I know I'm not the only one who's looked at a bill in January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface. On your laptop or on your phone, Monarch lets you link everything and gives you real time visibility so you're not shocked later. Right now, I've been checking the holiday spending category so I don't accidentally start the new year with that dreaded debt hangover. And honestly, just seeing everything laid out is already helping me stay more aware. This season, Monarch does the heavy lifting. It links your accounts in minutes, gives you smart categorization and super clear visuals. Yes, that end of year reset could be a real goal this time. Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virginonarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with the code Virgin.
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Have you ever tried to lose weight? Then you just hit that wall. So frustrating. I mean, it's amazing to see pounds start coming off. But then slowly, suddenly you hit a plateau and the weight is like a boulder or it boomerangs right back. I'm going to show you how to jump start fat loss and keep it off by cross training your diet. You know, just like you cross train your exercise to get fit. Hey there, I'm J. JJ Virgin and here's my cred. I'm a four times New York Times bestseller and a fitness hall of famer. And I help people lose weight and stop the weight regain by identifying their hidden food intolerances and lowering their sugar impact. I'm glad you're here because I think I have some things that can help you too. So if you want to make sure you don't miss this kind of good information, let's stay connected. All you have to do is hit like on this video and subscribe to this channel. So what the heck is cross training your diet and what will it do for you? Well, first, let's start with how most people think of cross training. A little of this, a little of this, and a little of this and suddenly you're in great shape. Now, you wouldn't only do one exercise for the rest of your life, would you?
No.
You work your way around the gym and then you mix it up. Otherwise your body adapts and stops improving. Changing it up does all of these amazing things for your health. It improves your fitness, it prevents injury, it improves your posture, your balance, it boosts your brain function. You recover faster and you don't get bored. You get the idea. So cross training your diet, well, it does the same thing. Now you're probably worried you'll be lifting watermelons like kettle balls, aren't you? You actually cross train your diet the same way you do with exercise, by changing it up and not eating the same amount of calories or the same macros all the time, mixing up the protein, the carbs and the fat. I mean, after all, your body isn't a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. And you have to change it up to make sure your body doesn't adapt and go into survival mode where it holds on to fat like it does when you stop starve yourself. We all know that doesn't work. Your body tries to keep that fat right there that it could be using for food. So it shut down fat burning. So to fuel your metabolism and break through plateaus, you need to cross chain and keep your body guessing. You want to keep it burning and not have it just count on one steady source of fuel. You don't want to ramp down like, oh, I got this, I don't need to work so hard. But first you have to prepare, get to a certain level of diet fitness, right? Like you wouldn't go out and be a triathlete the first day you decide to start exercising, right? Like, oh, I think my first day I'll run a few miles and I'll bike to the next town and I'll swim across the lake. No. So first you gotta set yourself up for success. Here's how you do it. Step one, you're going to identify your hidden food intolerances. Now, food intolerance is one of the major reasons you get inflamed and you can't drop weight. Here's the good news. You just need to take three weeks and do the virgin anti diet to figure out which foods are hurting you and which foods aren't. You can't get to your goal weight or look or feel great until you swap those high five high food intolerance foods out for ones that can heal you and fuel you. And here's what's awesome. Quite often, like always, I hear that those swaps taste even better than what you were eating. Now while you're doing that, you're also going to eat by the virgin anti diet plate. That means that each meal, no snacks, you're going to be eating clean protein. Those are things like wild fish, grass fed beef, pastured pork and chicken, healthy fats like avocado and coconut, nuts and seeds, and lots of fiber from non starchy vegetables and slow low carbs. The reasons we put that together like that is because it's super satisfying. You will be feeling fuller, longer, but not bloated, right? And it helps keep your blood sugar balanced. And speaking of blood sugar balance, step two is lowering your sugar impact. Now, sugar sneaks into our diets way more than we usually know in some of the most bizarro places. So first we're make sure you're getting out of the obvious places, right? Like don't add sugar in. Then we're going to look at all the places that could be sneaking in. So you want to check in with my sneaky sugar inventory in the links below to see where else you might need to Sherlock that sugar out. Now, once you lower your sugar impact and you improve your insulin sensitivity and your blood sugar balance, you're basically teaching your body to shift from only being able to be a sugar burner. That means you're like hungry every a couple hours you would never forget to eat to what I call a multi Fuel burner. That means that you can burn fat, you can burn carbs, and you can burn ketones for fuel. You are metabolically flexible. Once you're there, guess what? You are now ready to cross train your diet. And here's how you do it. Number one, you start fasting a couple times a week. Now this might sound like I'm hungry. Remember, hunger equals younger. But it's not as hard as it seems. First off, if you've been following me, you know that I advocate at least a 12 hour fast every night. That means shut the kitchen down, get out of there at least three to four hours after, before bedtime, right after dinner, lock it down and then wait an hour or two. When you wake up in the morning, do a little faster workout. So if you're going to bed at 10 and you stopped eating by 7 at the latest, and you woke up at 6 and you had breakfast around 8, look at how easy that was. That's right there. 13 hours. So the first thing we're going to do is do that. But what I want you to do a couple days a week is push that window so that you've got a 16 hour fast where maybe you're not having breakfast, you're having it more like brunch at about 10 and you have dinner a little bit earlier, so you stop eating at six. Next, number two. Now once you've done that, now you can get advanced. And once a week you can do something called omad. Sounds cool too, right? The reason you want to do omad, it's one meal a day and you're going to try to do this. I think the easiest time to do is on the weekend, sleep in and then have an early dinner. Easy peasy. Why do we want to do that? Well, you're doing a lot of caloric variability. You're making your stem cell production increase. That's anti aging. It's great for improving insulin sensitivity, which means you're going to have better blood sugar balance and burn fat and promote something called autophagy. This is basically cellular detox. It's your body taking out the cellular trash. All right, next one. Number three is varying your carbs. Now where are we getting our carbs? I talked about the plate and the protein, fat and fiber from non starchy vegetables and slow low carbs. I want you to still eat as many non starchy veggies as you possibly can. That's broccoli and brussels sprouts and cauliflower and deep green leafies, things like that. But your slow low carbs, things like wild rice or squashes or sweet potato. This is a thing that you can vary based on a couple of things. The biggest thing would be based on is your activity level. If you've got a big intense day and you're doing some hiit training and weight training, might do a couple more carbs that day, but maybe you've got a low level day, Maybe you're at a meditation retreat, take those carbs way down. So a little bit of that macro cycling can make a big difference too. And finally, and commit to this with me at least once a year, preferably a couple times, I want you to do an advanced detox. So that is where you really focus for anywhere from three to 21 days on some advanced detox strategies. And one time a year too. You want to make sure that you reassess annually both your food intolerance and your sugar impact. Make sure those sugars don't go sneaking back into your life. And most importantly, remember, dieting shouldn't be your hobby. It shouldn't be a way of life. It is a way to your best life. You want to use diets therapeutically to create the eating plan that's best for you. And that's one that's going to help you shift from being a sugar burner to a multi fuel burner where burning off that body fat is easy and automatic. I hope you've enjoyed this info on cross training your diet now. If you want to go deeper, check out some of the other resources in the link below. And don't forget to like and subscribe so you get more healthy diet intel tips and tricks. In the next video, we're going to start a series that helps you uncover what the issue could be if you're not losing weight, it may not be your diet. See you there.
For more info on this and other health topics I cover or to rate and review, find me on Instagram, Facebook and my website, jjvirgin.com and don't forget to subscribe to my show so you won't miss a single, single episode. Go to subscribetoj.com thanks again for being with me this week.
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